Mommy by Mistake (8 page)

“Of course I don’t mind,” Natalie said. She glanced through the French doors to where she could see Anthony hugging his girlfriend, gently kissing her hair and whispering some consolation. “She’s very strong to stand up for herself and Anthony against that. Very strong. I mean, I complain about my mom, God knows, but next to Tiffany’s parents she’d be up for Mother of the Year. I don’t know if I would be able to be as strong as Tiffany.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gary said. “You seem pretty strong to me, managing here all on your own.”

Natalie glanced at his face, taken aback by the first unbusiness-like thing he had ever said to her. Her scrutiny made Gary look uncomfortable again.

“I don’t do badly for a little woman, do I?” she said with a touch of irony.

“I’m just saying, when my daughter was born there were two
of us, more than two really, we had grandparents, aunts, uncles. But still me and Haley struggled. For about six months we felt like we were walking zombies, I don’t know how we did it. So the fact that you are doing it all on your own more or less, your husband away and not really any family about—well, I think that is quite impressive.”

For a moment Natalie was stunned into silence by the compliment. She hadn’t expected Gary Fisher to be actively thinking about her and what kind of person she was. And people were often irritated, intimidated, annoyed, or exasperated by her, but very rarely impressed. It made a nice change, and she was so pleasantly surprised that she had to remind herself not to be disappointed that her fake husband was already married, because this Gary was real Gary, not fantasy Gary. They were two entirely different men, especially considering one of them was pretend.

Natalie stopped that train of thought before she drove herself completely insane.

“So it got better at six months, did it?” she asked him cheerfully, because he looked embarrassed that he had said anything at all. “What about the terrible twos and threes? You’ll have to sit down and go through every year with me up until—how old is your little girl now?”

“Eight,” Gary said, breaking eye contact with her.

“Eight! You’re an expert,” Natalie said warmly. “Will you throw in some parenting lessons with the work you’re doing for me?”

“I’m not an expert,” Gary said, his smile closing down. “I don’t see her now.” His head dropped and Natalie wondered if she should give him a hug or something as he looked so sad, but somehow she thought he wasn’t the kind of man to appreciate an unsolicited hug from customers.

“Anyway, I’d better get on,” he said. He looked back into the
kitchen where Tiffany was now sitting at the table, wiping one eye and then the other with the sleeves of her top pulled down over her knuckles.

“Thanks,” he said to Natalie, who was not quite sure what he was thanking her for, and then he headed back inside. She stayed outside for a moment longer, watching him exchange a few words with Anthony. His apprentice placed one hand momentarily on Tiffany’s shoulder before he followed Gary upstairs.

The real Gary wasn’t as normal and as average as she had first thought, Natalie realized as she headed back inside to see Tiffany. She couldn’t really figure him out, which made him suddenly quite interesting to her. She had assumed that he was more or less two-dimensional, the kind of person you can read in an instant, but there was something else there, too. Hidden depths, as her mother would say, but hiding what?

“Okay?” she said to Tiffany as she walked in. She shivered in reaction to the heat of the kitchen after the chill of outdoors. “Fancy some tea? Gary’s made a pot. I think he must have time-traveled here from 1948. Who makes pots of tea anymore?”

“My mom does,” Tiffany said, propping her chin on the heels of her hands. “She makes a pot of tea and she sticks this hideous tea cozy on it and does up a tray with biscuits. Not nice ones, but those horrible pink ones that taste like cardboard. My mom loves those. She thinks she’s so”—Tiffany searched for the right word—“decent, but how can she be when she and Dad won’t have anything to do with me or Jordan because Anthony’s black?” She looked up at Natalie and shrugged. “I don’t get it,” she added weakly.

Natalie sat down and poured out two mugs of dark brown tea; the pungent scent hovered in the steam for a moment.

“We’re not supposed to ‘get’ our parents,” she said eventually.
“I have a theory that it’s to aid the evolution of man. Because if we got our parents and wanted to live the same way as they have lived and think and feel the way they do, then the world would never change or move on. It’s a good thing you don’t get your mom and dad, trust me. By not getting them, you’ve given yourself and Jordan a head start at growing up.”

Tiffany’s mouth curled into a small smile.

“Are you saying I’m not grown up?” she challenged Natalie lightly.

Natalie looked unapologetic. “Tiff,
I’m
not grown up and I’m thirty years old…”

Tiffany raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, thirty-six years old,” Natalie went on. “I have a son, an actual human life depending on
me
alone to exist, but I still feel the same inside as I did when I was your age. I have another theory…”

“Another one, seriously?” Tiff teased. “You don’t look like the theory type.”

“Oh, and what type do I look like then?” Natalie asked her, briefly diverted.

“The crazy type,” Tiff said, with another twist of a smile.

“Well, I
am
that type,” Natalie was forced to concede. “But I do have a philosophical side, too. And this theory is a good one.
I
think we all keep growing up until we die. I don’t think there’s ever a time when suddenly you feel totally confident and in charge and know exactly what to do in all situations. I think we will always be frightened and stressed and unsure and confused pretty much forever.”

“Oh God,” Tiff said flatly, dropping her forehead onto the tabletop with a light bump. “Thanks for that.”

Natalie smiled.

“It’s a shame you missed Baby Music,” she said after a while.

“It was hysterical. It’s amazing what normal, sane adults will do because it’s allegedly good for their kids.”

“Yeah, well,” Tiffany said. “I don’t know about the baby group anymore. I mean, it’s not really me, is it?”

“What?” Natalie exclaimed. “What do you mean, it’s not you? If it’s me it’s you, let me tell you, because none of that stuff is really me—especially not Baby Music.”

“No, it’s different,” Tiffany said. “I’m a kid living in a one-bedroom public housing flat. Look at your home—look at Meg’s! What about when it’s my turn to have the baby group? We haven’t even got a sofa. We sit on a beanbag. We have to take turns.”

“No one cares about that stuff,” Natalie tried to reassure her.

“I do, I care,” Tiffany told her. “It’s embarrassing. You’re all proper grown-ups with proper lives, husbands, and mortgages and all that shi—stuff.”

“Yes, well, that might be true, but we are all moms with babies—that’s all we need to have in common,” Natalie persisted. “And anyway, without your mom around, you need the company of old women. It will remind you that being older isn’t always wiser.”

“Maybe,” Tiffany replied with a small smile.

The pair sat in companionable silence as Natalie poured out two more cups of tea from her seldom-seen teapot.

“What about your mom, where’s she?” Tiffany asked her suddenly. “I thought most grannies except Jordan’s couldn’t wait to come and fuss round their grandchild. Or your husband’s parents—don’t they ever come over?”

Natalie nipped sharply at her bottom lip for a moment before saying, “Oh well, you know—in-laws. I was never going to be good enough for their little boy.” She took a large slurp of her tea and glanced around the kitchen. “Fancy a sandwich?”

“What about
your
mom, then?” Tiff asked, shaking her head to decline the offer of a snack.

“Oh, my mom,” Natalie said, rolling her eyes and preparing to rant. “My mom is…” And then she stopped herself. She had been about to tell Tiffany that her mom was an absolutely terrible mother, not to mention a really bad human being generally, which was what she normally told people. But then she realized that next to Tiffany’s parents, her mom, with her pathological sunbathing obsession, together with her drinking sangria in the morning compulsion, smoking while eating habit, and insistence on conducting affairs with highly unsuitable men who only wanted her for her nonexistent money, wasn’t quite as bad. Even with the resentment that Natalie held steadfastly against her for constantly moving her from town to town during her childhood and for never being the kind of sensible, sexless mother that the other kids had, she still didn’t come off as badly as a woman who was racist toward her own grandchild.

“My mom lives in Spain and I haven’t seen her in about two years or spoken to her for months and she doesn’t even know I was pregnant, let alone that I’ve had a baby.” The truth just slipped out of Natalie’s mouth unbidden and flopped onto the table like a caught fish gasping for air.

“What!”
Tiffany exclaimed. “You haven’t told her you were pregnant? But why not? I know you think no one ever grows up, but
you’re
not a sixteen-year-old kid, Natalie—you’re married! Why wouldn’t you tell your mom about Freddie?”

Natalie considered the prospect of telling the truth about her marital status and for a second time decided against it; the truth in general always seemed to cause such a fuss.

“She never liked Gary…” she began.

“Gary?” Tiffany interrupted her. “Your husband is named Gary too?”

“Yeah,” Natalie said quickly. “Common name, isn’t it?” Tiffany said nothing but Natalie thought she saw an indefinable look cross her face.

“And she made it very difficult for us to get together. She didn’t come to the wedding or anything and so…well, we drifted apart,” Natalie said, feeling a sudden compulsion to eat a large amount of cake and heading to the bread bin where she had stored her latest bar of ginger cake intended for the next baby group meeting. She cut a large slice and didn’t bother to put it on a plate. She sat back down and took two big bites, cupping her free hand under her chin as she munched.

“You should tell your mom,” Tiffany said simply. “You should give her a chance to do the right thing.”

Natalie looked into Tiffany’s pale blue eyes regarding her so seriously and thoughtfully, and felt one hundred percent stupid.

How could it be that this slip of a girl behaved with more intelligence and integrity than she did? Why did she persist in telling half-truths and spinning fantasies to the people who were becoming the first real friends she had ever made since somehow getting Alice to like her? It was as if she had an instinctive impulse to complicate her life unnecessarily, and to store up trouble in case things got too easy and relaxing.

Tiffany was right; her theory that nobody ever grows up was a rubbish one. If Natalie was absolutely honest she was the only person she knew, excepting some babies, who hadn’t achieved emotional adulthood yet.

“I’d better go,” Tiff said suddenly, scraping her chair back across the tiles. “Thanks for the tea.”

“That’s okay,” Natalie said brightly, finishing off the last of the cake and wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. “Look, we’re going to this baby aerobics class at the sports center on Fri
day. God knows what it will be like. I’ve got this mental image of a bunch of babies doing sit-ups—but anyway, please come.”

Tiffany still looked uncertain as she pulled on her parka. “How much does it cost?” she asked.

“Don’t know really,” Natalie said. “Look, come. I can always pay if you haven’t got enough.”

Tiffany shook her head. “No thanks,” she said.

“But you will try to come, won’t you?” Natalie persisted, wondering suddenly if Tiffany might feel vulnerable, isolated so brutally from her family and with Anthony out all day working.

“I don’t know,” Tiff said, looking weary. “I’ll feel…funny.”

Natalie crossed over to her and without thinking put her arms around the girl and hugged her.

“Rubbish,” she said. “You are a founding member of the group and I for one really like you. Look, if you really feel too intimidated to come out with the rest of the group, then I will always do something separately with you. I know you can’t be intimidated by me—because you’ve heard my theories and you know what an idiot I am.”

“That’s true,” Tiffany said, her face brightening a little. “Okay, I’ll try and come on Friday. It will be a laugh seeing you try to do aerobics.”

After Tiffany had gone Natalie went upstairs, passing Gary and Anthony who were working in companionable silence in the hallway. She crept into her bedroom and looked down at Freddie sleeping in his cot, gathering all the reserves of strength he would need to keep her up all night. He was fair-skinned, with ruddy cheeks and a thick thatch of flat, jet-black hair that seemed to perch on the top of his baby head like a wig made for someone much bigger. Natalie smiled fondly at him but at the same time felt a pinch of anxiety in her abdomen.

It was Jack Newhouse’s baby who was sleeping so sweetly and peacefully in his cot in her house.

Natalie bit her lip and resisted the impulse to laugh out loud. She’d got herself into some pretty insane scrapes before now. There was that time she’d accepted a lift back to her hotel from an allegedly Swedish guy she had only just met in the center of Paris. Instead of taking her home he’d tried to kidnap her, but luckily he was the world’s least menacing kidnapper, and as soon as she started screaming he had pulled over and dumped her at the side of the road in a part of Paris she didn’t recognize at all. She had had to pay two prostitutes to take her back to where she was staying.

Until now she had thought that was possibly the most foolish and worst situation she had ever been in. That was until she had somehow ended up with Jack Newhouse’s secret baby in a cot in her house while he was somewhere in London, probably even now attempting to seduce yet another conquest. And now she had Jack’s telephone numbers by her bed and she knew she had to dial them, because Alice was right, it was a secret that should not be kept from either father or child. Natalie knew from painful experience that the truth, even a difficult one, was easier to bear than years of wondering and false hope. The prospect of making that call, combined with an imaginary husband in Dubai and a set of surprisingly lovely new friends who might all drop her like a hot brick as soon as they found out what kind of a flake she was, more or less topped any sticky situation she’d ever got herself into before.